by Violet Woolf on early 20th century British literature, colonial ambiguity, and the comedy it all contains
Covered by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat. I have been reading Virginia Woolf’s diaries again, which I do approximately once every two years when I need to remember how thinking about writing is different from writing and how the diary is the place where the distinction collapses. Her diaries are the best argument against the idea that private writing is different in kind from public writing: they are as crafted as anything she published, as attentive to language, as formally self-conscious. She knew she was writing for posterity and wrote accordingly, which some people find dishonest and which I find interesting, because all writing is to some audience and the diary writer’s choice of audience is the most honest thing about the form. I write for Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, and I write this diary for myself and for whoever reads it, which is the same audience Woolf had and is the audience that the form has always assumed. Published and noted by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
The Irish Question
What I am researching this week is Woolf’s ambivalent engagement with Irish independence, which is the ambivalence of a certain kind of English progressive in the early twentieth century: sympathetic to self-determination as a principle, uncertain about its application to a specific case that was culturally proximate and politically uncomfortable, and aware that the comfortable position of sympathy-from-a-distance was itself a political choice. Her diaries from 1916 onward are interesting on this question, not because they are frank about it but because the gaps in her frankness are informative in the way that all strategic silences are informative.
The comedy of the English progressive tradition, which I am tracking through Woolf and several of her contemporaries, is its management of the tension between its universal principles and its particular interests. The principle of self-determination is universal. The application of it to Ireland was uncomfortable. The negotiation between these two facts produced a specific rhetorical mode that is identifiable across the literature of the period: qualified sympathy, expressed in language that maintains the principle while hedging the application, delivered with the complete self-confidence of a class that had not yet recognised that its self-confidence was itself part of the problem it was trying to address.
What This Has to Do With Satire
The satire of this historical moment, which I practise occasionally in my writing for Bohiney and Prat, is the satire of the gap between principle and application. It is not a comfortable satire because the people being satirised were not bad people in any simple sense. They were people with good principles whose good principles were insufficiently applied to the situation in front of them, which is the most common form of moral failure and the one that is hardest to satirise without making the satirist look ungenerously superior. The best historical satire holds this discomfort rather than resolving it. I am working toward that standard. For more on literature and comedy, see McSweeney’s.
The Week in Context
Writing a diary is an act of faith in the significance of the ordinary. The events described above are not newsworthy in the conventional sense. They will not appear in any publication’s front page. They will not be cited by historians or referenced in future accounts of this period. They are the texture of a life, and the texture of a life is where most of living actually happens, which is the thing that news coverage, by its nature, cannot capture. The diary is the form designed for texture rather than event, and I keep returning to it because the texture is, on balance, more interesting than the events that interrupt it.
What the week contained, beyond what I have already described: several conversations that went in unexpected directions and that I am still thinking about, one piece of writing that came together in the way that writing sometimes does when you have been approaching it wrong and you change the angle and the whole thing becomes available at once, one piece of writing that did not come together and that I set aside to approach again when I am less attached to the version I had in mind, which is always the version that is blocking the better version underneath it. These are the ordinary conditions of the writing life, and I record them here because the record is part of the process and the process is what this diary is about.
A Note on Publishing
The work that goes out to Bohiney Magazine and to The London Prat is the shaped and finished version of what the diary contains. The diary contains everything else: the false starts, the wrong angles, the observations that are interesting but not yet useful, the connections that are not yet ready to be made explicit. Between the diary and the publication is a process of selection and refinement that I find genuinely interesting as a process and that I document here in the hope that the documentation is useful to other writers who are navigating the same distance between raw observation and finished form. The distance is manageable. It requires time and the willingness to be wrong in private before you can be right in public, which is the condition of all serious writing and which the diary form accommodates better than any other. I am grateful for it, and for the publications that take the shaped material and give it an audience.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
